Free-to-Air TV finally responds to download issues

 Media, Strategy  3 Responses »
Jun 272007
 

Interesting story today in the Sydney Morning Herald about the decision by Channel Seven to synchronise its broadcast of two high-rating shows – Heroes and Prison Break – with that of their US TV premiere.

The stated objective of this move was to reduce the loss of audiences to DVD and (I suspect, more importantly) file download services.

The network’s programming director, Tim Worner, was quoted as saying: “There has been a thunderous demand online for this.”

He is absolutely right, but I wonder if the move isn’t already too late.

Broadcast TV has long taken its key audiences for granted. It has allowed commercialism to steadily erode the relationships it had built with its audiences.

Devoted fans of top-rating shows were regularly treated with contempt. Stations would frequently re-jig timeslots. Scheduled broadcast times were often ignored to cater for over-runs by “live” shows, which many read as an attempt to foil viewer’s preference to ‘time shift’ their favourite shows using PVRs.

The biggest insult, however, was the practice adopted by several stations of refusing to program episodes of their higher rating shows against a superior offering on another channel. Stations would often program a repeat of an episode against a major ‘live’ event or program launch, and hold over the next sequential episode in the current series until the following week, when it would have a clearer run.

Undoubtedly there are very sound financial justifications for doing this (specifically, avoiding the cost of any “make good” advertising that has to be given to major advertisers/sponsors if the show fails to rate adequately). Yet, as has since become clear, these short term, financially-driven decisions created long-term financial pain.

Few television viewers feel compelled to offer loyalty to TV stations. Those who are able to avoid the tyranny of broadcast scheduling – by purchasing entire series on DVD, timeshifting or simply downloading illicit copies via P2P exchanges – will often do so without compunction.

It didn’t have to come to this. The attractant of broadcast TV was “free” entertainment. You have to be doing something incredibly wrong when consumers are motivated to spend both time and money to find an alternative to a “free” product.

Can the erosion of free-to-air audiences be halted? Absolutely. Channel 7′s decision to reduce it dependence on artificial ‘windowing’ of TV broadcast schedules is certainly a good first step. It should now look at what it can do to tap into the passions of its most dedicated viewers, by adopting ‘viewership loyalty reward’ schemes similar to those of overseas broadcasters, increase audience participation (and audience-to-audience interaction) initiatives, and enable viewer word-of-mouth promotion.

It should also significantly expand its offerings of TV shows for sale (via iTunes or other services), to cater to the growing market of consumers with the preference to watch TV show episodes that way.

Given Channel 7′s decision to spearhead the launch of MyTiVo in Australia, it clearly has decided to hedge its bets on whether its strategy for retaining live audience share will be successful.

Should Yahoo! quit the search business?

 Interactive, Leadership, Media  No Responses »
Jun 212007
 

Reports that News Corp has made overtures to Yahoo! about swapping MySpace for a 25% equity stake has led the New York Times to speculate about whether Yahoo! should exit the search business and, instead, contract Google to provide search capabilities (ironically, this would have the company performing a full-loop, as it was Google’s contract with Yahoo to provide search functionality that gave Google its initial fillip).

The article quotes Jim Breyer, a Silicon Valley VC who invested in Facebook, as saying: ”They should take a hard look at the search business, and it may well be the right time to stop trying to out-Google Google”.

He’s completely right, but probably not for the reasons advocated in the article.

The primary distinction between Google and Yahoo! – which now seems firmly entrenched in their respective corporate cultures – is that Google is an engineering-led company, whereas Yahoo! is a media-led company.

While Yahoo!’s founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were PhD candidates in electrical engineering, and thus every bit as ‘techy’ as Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were graduate computer science students, both sets of founders made very different choices about the CEOs appointed to grow their businesses.

Page and Brin recruited (Dr) Eric Schmidt from Novell, a technology company with deep engineering roots. Filo and Yang, on the other hand, recruited Terry Semel, a media industry executive who was co-CEO of Warner Bros (and who admitted he was no Internet or technology expert).

Their choices of CEO reflected the founders’ visions for their companies – Google saw itself as a “pure” search company, whereas Yahoo! (aggressively pursuing its portal strategy) saw itself as a media company.

Yahoo! won’t be able to “out-Google Google” because they are very different companies, designed to serve very different market needs.

Search is very individualistic, egocentric and task-oriented. Media, on the other hand, is implicitly social. Consumers approach each service with different expectations, and, accordingly, expect a different experience.

The business of search is all about optimising algorithms, and Google has hired some of the best brains in the business to focus on precisely that. The business of media, however, is not about algorithms (although they do play a role in making the media experience ‘smarter’). Media is about intangible, mushy concepts like emotions, relationships, connectedness, ‘tribalism’ and  other socio-cultural drivers.

Where Yahoo! has come unstuck is that while it professes to be a media services company, it hasn’t adequately managed cultural change to facilitate that vision.

It still has an engineering core, onto which it has bolted some media divisions and executives. The end result is a business environment that is not aligned with, or capable of delivering, the services and experiences its consumers expect. Nor has it been capable of creating revenue models and advertising offerings that better integrate with its products, audience and (importantly) audience behavioural patterns.

Consequently it has not been able to make significant in-roads into the gap between Google’s ability to ‘monetise’ traffic (analysts report that Google is able to extract twice as much revenue per page of content served than Yahoo!).

Yahoo! should certainly stop trying to out-Google Google, because it isn’t in the same market.

There is no Web 2.0…

 3rd Horizon  1 Response »
Jun 122007
 

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and now a software entrepreneur, has launched a personal blog, Pmarca.

He recently published an article in which he argues there is no such thing as Web 2.0.

As I responded in a comment, I absolutely agree that there is no Web 2.0 (and there most certainly isn’t a such a thing as a ‘space’).

I view current events as the continuation along a spectrum of usefulness and usability.

Back in the day (!), pre-Mosaic/Netscape, we had tools like Archie and WAIS for searching and accessing data/information available over the Internet. You would (physically) sit in front of one computer, use telnet to connect to another computer system, which would then use a tool like Archie to tap into information on yet another computer system.

The Web really just brought everything one step closer – you used a browser to go to a Web site, and that web site (through the ‘magic’ of hypertext) pulled things together for you (or sent you somewhere else to get it).

So information – or the ‘stuff’ you wanted – was only 1 step away from you, rather than 2 (or, euphemistically, 1 degree of separation, not 2).

We’re now seeing a bunch of changes converging to achieve the removal of that 1 degree of separation. We’re approaching a time where you won’t actually “go” to the Web/Internet to get the “stuff” you wanted – it will come to you (some are calling this your ‘personal information cloud’).

All the kinds of things that fall under the generally heading of Web 2.0 – tags, social sharing, folksonomies, RSS, APIs etc. – are really all about packaging, sorting, filtering and zeroing in on all of the ‘stuff’ out there that we want, in such a way that it comes to us, so that we need not ever have to go ‘there’.

So this Web 2.0 meme is really a 2/10 signal – in 2 yrs, a lot of people will be sitting around underwhelmed by what has transpired, but in 10 years, we’ll look back and point to this time as an inflection point for a profound change.

It won’t be too long before the opening position of a post like this will be: The Web doesn’t exist. (it is fading away as I type…)

Taking Web 2.0 Offline

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Jun 122007
 

I’m testing a new blog publishing tool. While I love the WordPress blogging software I am using on this site, I have found posting articles quite a painful process at times. You have to fire up a web browser, connect to the administration page of the blog, enter the administration username and password, wait for the management front-end to display, select the ‘post’ option, then commence the writing and posting process.

*phew*

So when I started trialing offline blog writing tools, I was hoping it would make life a little easier for me.

This is my first post, using Windows Live Writer. So far, the process couldn’t be simpler.

When running it for the first time after installation, Live Writer asked me for the URL of this blog and my administrative details. It then *auto* detected the kind of blogging software I was running and how I have structured the blog (including the categories I have used), and configured itself to act as a ‘posting proxy’ of sorts. It also attempted to auto-detect the ‘skin’ I was using for layout, but was not successful on that part.

Still, here I am composing my first post via a small and nimble piece of software, on my laptop. I don’t need to repeat the steps outlined earlier to post, so I am more productive. Importantly, I can draft and prepare posts when I am offline.

This is becoming an increasingly important capability, and one overlooked by many jumping onto the Web 2.0-will-change-the-world bandwagon.

Undoubtedly, being able to access your information and tools from anywhere is very, very useful. But it also introduces some very serious problems and choke-points.

All the convenience, flexibility and power simply disappears the second you encounter ‘broadband separation’, as often is the case when we’re traveling, working from alternate premises (e.g. client site or a hotel that has overly restrictive firewalls) or your service provide has an outage.

It is for this reason that Google (and undoubtedly others) have been working very hard to implement functionality (through products like Google Gears) that enable predominantly Web-based applications to provide a measure of utility even when you cannot connect to the Web.

This is an important next step in the growing maturity of the Software As A Service lifecycle. It doesn’t matter how technologically competent you are, or how evolved your trust and faith in the Deities of Technology, it is a very real human need to know that, if worst comes to worst, you can still access your important data.